What one pot or ceramic piece have you seen that has really "stuck with you" in a memorable way? | Q.O.W. 12/4/12

What one pot or ceramic piece have you seen that has really "stuck with you" in a memorable way?

(Maybe post an image in the thread if you can.)

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I am going to cheat by saying it is an entire collection of 3,000 to 4,000 BC pottery from Eastern Europe.
My husband and I were in the Natural Sciences Museum in Vienna searching for the Venus of Willendorf and located it on an entire floor of the museum dedicated to ancient pottery. Room after room of beautifully presented pottery and re-constructed shards. The forms were so contemporary that it was a very humbling experience and made me hyper aware that my shards could find their way into a future museum and speak to our society at that point in history. YIKES ... to say the least. Another thing that struck me was the urge to decorate ... some potters could leave it alone but others just had to embellish.

I am with Chris in that my favorite museums are the archeology museums like the one in Madrid wirh ancient burial urns, or the U of Pa collections of Pre-columbian pots, or the Maritime museum in Cartegana Spain with a loaded cargo ship stacked with amphorae from the harbor dating back to the Phoenicians.
Marcia

Me, too. I'm a fan of ancient pottery. My favorite is Minoan. I love the apparent spontaneity and the so-pregnant-that-they're-going-to-explode look of some of the shapes and the way an octopus can cover such a pot so beautifully. BTW, one of the big discoveries of the year (in the current issue of Archaeology magazine) is pottery in southern China that set the emergence of pottery back in time from about 10,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago.

BTW, one of the big discoveries of the year (in the current issue of Archaeology magazine) is pottery in southern China that set the emergence of pottery back in time from about 10,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago.

Actually Jim, Japan had already found proto-Jomon work dated back to about 14,000 to 15,000 BCE. I've seen some pieces of the work in archeology museums there. So the new Chinese find pushed it back a bit more like 5,000 years. Still an amazing discovery. But anyone who knows anything about clay could look at the earlies pots discovereed in Japan and know that they were be far from the "first pots made by humankind". Even the earliest that had been found are pretty sophisticated execution. Someone was passing on skills.

I now have to do some research on the Chinese find and then revise the very introductory part of my "History of Japanese Ceramics" course curriculum.

BTW, one of the big discoveries of the year (in the current issue of Archaeology magazine) is pottery in southern China that set the emergence of pottery back in time from about 10,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago.

Actually Jim, Japan had already found proto-Jomon work dated back to about 14,000 to 15,000 BCE. I've seen some pieces of the work in archeology museums there. So the new Chinese find pushed it back a bit more like 5,000 years. Still an amazing discovery. But anyone who knows anything about clay could look at the earlies pots discovereed in Japan and know that they were be far from the "first pots made by humankind". Even the earliest that had been found are pretty sophisticated execution. Someone was passing on skills.

I now have to do some research on the Chinese find and then revise the very introductory part of my "History of Japanese Ceramics" course curriculum.

best,

......................john

Maybe a letter to Archaeology magazine by you is in order. I thought 10,000 years ago (only 8,000 BCE) was a bit young. Thanks for the info.

Actually, back in 1974 or 75 there was a show "Recent Archeological Discoveries since Mao. It think it was in DC and there were long lines snaking through. There was on pot with a luscious celedon glaze. It was a small spittoon with a bulbous bottom section and an extremely flared upper half.
Every potter I knew who saw that show thought that spittoon was the most beautiful pot in the whole exhibition.

I was studying the mound builders who were building homes and villages in N. America 1000 years before the Egyptian pyramids were started and they had uncovered a small piece of ceramic art. It was a crude figure of a woman, their society worshiped women, at that time in my life women weren't being paid well and were blatantly sexually harassed at work. The little figurine had been thrown in a cooking fire and survive 3000 years, it gave me hope, maybe in my life time women would be treated equally as men and maybe even worshiped a little and it's CLAY. Denice

A few years ago I visited Cedar Creek Gallery in North Carolina and saw some really nice work there. One of the things that has stuck in my mind is a set of nesting bowls that were softly squared off and glazed in green with stripes of other colors going vertically. Don't know why except that I liked the forms and the colors and the stripes. And the weight of them. They felt good to hold. I thought they were well done. Wish I had bought them.